Michonne searches for Rick at Bridgers Terminal in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, but what she discovers there is not easily explained.
Warning: spoilers ahead for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live episode 2.
Summary
- Michonne faces a gruesome scene at Bridgers Terminal, hinting at a tragic event that wiped out the community.
- The CRM is most likely behind the massacre, possibly to protect their secret existence or eliminate an ally that stopped proving useful.
- Michonne’s search for Rick leads her to mistakenly believe he was at Bridgers Terminal.
Before Michonne finds Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, she encounters a deeply disturbing scene at Bridgers Terminal, raising questions over precisely what happened there. The Ones Who Live episode 2 focuses on Michonne’s search for Rick immediately after her exit from The Walking Dead‘s main cast. Her only clue is “Bridgers Terminal” – a location mentioned in the manifest of the boat containing Rick’s belongings from The Walking Dead season 10.
The sign promising “safe harbor” proves to be false advertising, as Michonne and Nat reach Bridgers Terminal to find piles of burned corpses. Most have been stripped of their shoes and personal belongings, and while Michonne eventually realizes Rick wasn’t among them after she finds him working as a Civic Republic Military soldier, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live keeps the details of what happened at Bridgers Terminal sketchy. Nevertheless, some disturbing assumptions about what befell this shipyard community can be made.
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The CRM Could Have Wiped Out Bridgers Terminal
Bridgers Terminal was evidently a thriving Walking Dead community once upon a time. The boat with the “safe harbor” sign bears the hallmarks of a rudimentary post-apocalyptic civilization. Alas, something happened to the Bridgers Terminal survivors, and unless the corpses somehow arranged themselves into neat piles, another community must have been responsible for the massacre. The CRM has the means to commit murder on such a scale, and has a history of wiping out smaller communities. Additionally, the organized mounds of dead bodies point more toward a militaristic force destroying Bridgers Terminal, not some random survivor group.
There are two main reasons the CRM may have wanted Bridgers Terminal taken off the board. Firstly, the fact that a boat spotted in Civic Republic territory during The Walking Dead‘s series finale listed Bridgers Terminal on its manifest suggests a trading arrangement may have existed between the communities. As proven when the CRM wiped out Omaha in The Walking Dead: World Beyond, the CRM has a tendency to erase allies when their usefulness expires, which may explain what happened with Bridgers Terminal.
The second possibility depends on whether the boat visited Bridgers Terminal before or after Rick threw his stuff onto the deck in The Walking Dead‘s finale. If the Bridgers folks found Rick’s gear – gear that a CRM helicopter must have seen Rick lob onto the boat – the CRM may have ordered the settlement’s destruction to protect the Civic Republic’s secret existence. Effectively, this would mean Rick caused the deaths of everyone in the shipyard community.
Why Michonne Thought Rick Would Be At Bridgers Terminal
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live provides more insight into the movements of the boat Michonne discovered before her temporary exit. Michonne found the vessel at Bloodsworth Island in Maryland, washed up after a storm. As seen in The Walking Dead‘s ending, however, the ship was near the Civic Republic in Philadelphia when Rick tossed his bag and boots onto it. And yet, in The Ones Who Live episode 2, Nat points out how the ship’s manifest lists Bridgers Terminal in New Jersey as the most recent stop.
Putting the pieces together, it seems that the boat began near Philadelphia with Rick. It either washed south to Maryland, allowing Michonne to find the proof of Rick’s survival. Exactly where Bridgers Terminal comes on that journey is unclear. The boat could have stopped at the shipyard before Rick’s scene in The Walking Dead‘s final episode, or may have been anchored at Bridgers Terminal between Philadelphia and Maryland, with Rick’s stuff on board.
As confirmed in The Walking Dead season 10, the vessel washed up on Bloodsworth after a storm, suggesting it had already been abandoned by its owners. Given the state Michonne finds the residents of Bridgers Terminal in, it would make sense if the boat was present at Bridgers Terminal during the massacre, then left to float aimlessly after everyone was killed, allowing it to drift south toward Maryland.
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Either way, Rick Grimes has no connection to Bridgers Terminal whatsoever in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. Michonne simply assumes so because it was the most recent location on the manifest. She had no clue that Rick’s only connection to the ship was from a fleeting moment during a failed escape attempt. While Rick himself may not have visited Bridgers Terminal, however, his employers certainly may have. If the CRM was responsible for burning down the community, that only underlines how evil Rick and Michonne’s new enemy truly is.